


Vorkosigan Plotbunnies - Free to Good Home

by TempleCloud



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Star Wars - All Media Types, Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Multi, Plotbunnies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:27:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24611515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TempleCloud/pseuds/TempleCloud
Summary: These are a few ideas I've had for stories set partly within the Vorkosigan universe (frequently crossing it with other fandoms in unlikely combinations).  I don't feel able to write most of them, either because I don't know the setting well enough, or because I have the idea of a beginning of a story but don't know where it will end up, so I'd be interested to hear whether anyone else wants to use them.  Some are inspired by other people's fanfics, which I will include links to.  In these cases, it's probably best if you contact the writer of the original to ask them whether they're okay with your writing a fanfic based on theirs.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	1. Aral, Cordelia and Bothari at Hogwarts

Reluctant child prostitute Konstantine Bothari discovers that he’s a wizard after setting fire to a customer by magic. This is obviously bad news, since being a wizard by definition means you’re a mutie – so any hopes he had had of finding companionship and acceptance in one of the gangs of street urchins, or of joining the Imperial Service if he lives to grow up, have now gone up in flames.

Rescued by his grown-up cousin Professor Snape (who, like him, had been born in the Caravanserai and left at the earliest opportunity), he escapes to a magical school in a castle on eagle’s talons in the Dendarii Mountains (because Hogwarts Castle would definitely need something more impressive than chickens’ feet) at which people play ball games from flying mortars. He becomes friends with people he would never have expected to have anything in common with: a Vor boy whose horse-breeding parents are baffled by his preferring mortar-flying to horse-riding, and a Betan who had run away from her home planet after reading the school counsellor’s mind and realising that the counsellor thought that her magical powers were a psychotic reaction to her father’s death. (Okay, if we were going by canonical character ages, Cordelia would be about three years old at this point, but this is an AU fusion in which Hogwarts Castle is on Barrayar, so ‘canonical’ is optional.)

For a few weeks, it looks as though their lives won’t involve any greater worries than schoolwork, mortar practice, and Aral’s angst over being a Gryffindor whose boyfriend is a Slytherin. If I were writing this, I think I’d want Cordelia to be Sorted into Ravenclaw and Konstantine into Hufflepuff. (Sorting Hat: ‘ _Hmmm, interesting. Plenty of courage here, and loyalty, if you ever find anyone worth being loyal to. Potential for warrior magic – and healing magic. Capable of being devious when necessary, but you’re not nearly ambitious enough to belong in Slytherin – and no, wanting to escape a life of abuse isn’t what a Slytherin would mean by ambition. You’re certainly brave enough to be in Gryffindor, but it would encourage some of your worst tendencies, and Slytherin would encourage other of your worst tendencies._ [By this time, Konstantine is starting to worry about whether any of the Houses will accept him.] _Well, if what you need is a House that can accept you, and be the family you never had – definitely better make it Hufflepuff._ ’) However, you’re welcome to decide that they’re all Gryffindors if that makes things simpler, especially as first-years seem to socialise mainly with people from their own House. Cordelia is baffled by the whole idea of House rivalry, especially the tradition of enmity between Gryffindor and Slytherin. Konstantine explains that it’s because it’s easier to be a gang if there’s another gang for you to fight. Cordelia points out that if the entire wizarding population of Barrayar is only enough to need one school of six hundred pupils between eleven and eighteen, surely wizards must be a tiny enough minority without needing to divide them up any further.

A few weeks into the autumn term, Aral receives a message that his mother and brother and sister are dead, and resolves to run away from school to help his father in the war against Emperor Yuri. Obviously, his friends aren’t going to leave him to face the danger alone – they’re coming with him. And so the adventure begins – but I have no idea where it would go from there, which is why I’m not the person writing it.


	2. Vorbarra's Terrier Returns

A sequel to [Vorbarra's Terrier](https://archiveofourown.org/works/123042) by Tel-Writing: Sam Vimes (who has been renamed Lord Vorbohn by Emperor Ezar) prevents the Escobar War from happening. Now he and Aral Vorkosigan need to work together to find an alternative solution to the problem of Prince Serg.


	3. Constable Kosigan, Municipal Guard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another Discworld crossover, possibly a sequel to the previous chapter's suggestion.

After failing his Academy entrance exams, teenage Miles puts his skills as a budding detective to good use by working for the Municipal Guard, where he becomes fascinated by the young non-com who is training him. Sergeant Ironfoundersson comes from a village in the Dendarii Mountains whose inhabitants are as short as Miles, and would be considered mutants if they weren't all so strong, healthy and long-lived - and yet Ironfoundersson is two metres tall, has hazel eyes and looks strikingly like Emperor Gregor.

Miles makes friends with another new recruit, Constable Uberwald, first woman to join the Municipal Guard, and actually Lady Angua Voruberwald, whose mother had been a school acquaintance of Alys’s. Angua’s father, Count Voruberwald, is notoriously reclusive, having delegated all his responsibilities, both in District administration and in voting in the Council of Counts, as soon as his son, Lord Voruberwald, came of age. Voruberwald District is fairly remote and has a reputation for being traditionally the place where mutants fled to avoid being persecuted by the rest of Barrayar – but these days refugees are streaming _out_ of it to escape Lord Voruberwald. What is the truth behind the rumours that the Voruberwald family are mutants, and that Angua's brother murdered their sister for _not_ being a mutant?


	4. The Vor, the Slum-boy, and the Wookiee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Star Wars crossover

In the course of his covert ops duties, Miles needs to team up with Han Solo and Chewbacca. This is awkward, not only because Miles is jealous of Han for being the sort of tall, strong, good-looking guy who always gets the girl, but also because Han has a grudge against the Vor. Having been educated by the Imperial Service Academy but then cashiered for disobeying an illegal order, Han is bitter that Miles, who had taken part in a mutiny in very similar circumstances, had got away with it, because things work very differently if you're the son of the Emperor's right-hand man from if you're some random orphan from the Caravanserai like Han. The fact that it was Miles's father who had given Han his training on disobeying illegal orders just adds insult to injury.

As the Vorkosigan universe doesn't appear to have sapient aliens, and the alien life it does have doesn't resemble Earth mammals, I expect Chewbacca is a genetically engineered life-form made from a mixture of human, ape and bear DNA, and that he probably began his life as a slave on Jackson's Whole. But there’s no reason he couldn’t be an alien – after all, some of the planets, especially Sergyar, hold rich enough ecosystems that they might have intelligent native life.


	5. Asylum Seekers

An AU of [_Free the Prisoners_ ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/158959) by Philomytha. Philomytha’s story is an AU in which Cordelia manages to satisfy the authorities on Beta Colony that she is neither insane nor a Barrayaran spy, with the result that she does not defect to Barrayar. Aral’s suicidal depression becomes so severe that Simon Illyan, in order to save his life, persuades him to defect to Beta Colony and claim refugee status there.

In my AU of an AU, Sergeant Bothari overhears this conversation, briefly wonders what to do about it, and decides he’s going with Aral, rationalising this as: ‘The Count your father told me to follow you and see that you came to no harm. He didn’t say I had to keep you on Barrayar.’ Apart from his personal loyalty to Aral, and anxiety over Aral’s self-destructive behaviour, he doesn’t get on well with the other Vorkosigan Armsmen (who regard him as either a malingerer or a sissy because he keeps getting ill from the after-effects of memory-suppression conditioning), and he misses Cordelia as much as Aral does, even though it’s too politically dangerous to admit that he even remembers that she exists.

Aral is apprehensive – if Beta Colony is likely to be dangerous for him, as he is merely an alleged war criminal, how much worse is it going to be for Bothari as an actual war criminal? Still, Bothari refuses to be dissuaded, and Aral tells himself that, after all, it’s not as if the Betans are likely to treat Bothari more harshly than the Barrayaran authorities have already done, and they might even be able to help him.

Bothari is adamant that he wasn't going to leave his daughter behind, as he knows all too well how dangerous a place Barrayar is for unprotected children. All right, theoretically Elena should be safe in the Imperial Orphanage, but in practice, children in care might suffer any fate from being raped by the people who are supposed to look after them, to being so lonely and insecure that they go off with anyone who seems to offer affection and attention. On balance, even taking a child to the (from a Barrayan's point of view) hive of galactic decadence that is Beta Colony seems like the less alarming option. Of course, this makes things more complicated, as Aral’s schedule now has to balance (A) ‘declaim revolution and get persecuted by the secret police until I’m forced to flee my home planet,’ and (B) ‘make sure that both Sergeant Bothari and I spend enough time at Mistress Hysopi’s house learning the basics of baby-care.’ (It’s best if they both learn, so that one can take over if the other is incapacitated – and besides, if Aral has any hope at all of getting married to Cordelia and having children of his own, he’s going to need to know this stuff anyway.)

After an initial medical screening and psychological profiling when they first arrive on Beta Colony, Bothari is almost immediately taken into involuntary therapy. This is alarming for him, for rather different reasons from those Cordelia experienced. He knows that he has problems, and wants to get better, but ‘therapy’ has some fairly horrific connotations for him after his experiences in the ImpMil hospital. Also, being in solitary confinement is deeply traumatic for him, triggering hallucinations – but on the other hand, in the aftermath of a war between Barrayar and Beta Colony, the hospital can hardly invite a dangerously disturbed and violent Barrayaran soldier to share a room with a Betan who might have a grudge against Barrayarans.

In spite of all this, however, Bothari is willing to co-operate, as he is desperate to get his memory back. He knows, from the fragments of memory that he had managed to smuggle past ImpMil, that most of the memories uncovered are likely to be unpleasant, but finding out can’t be worse than wondering and imagining and worrying about what atrocities he might have committed and upon whom. By now, Betan therapists have had quite a lot of experience with traumatised ex-soldiers who have been subjected to Barrayaran memory-erasure – but not usually one who has a whole mess of other mental illnesses including schizophrenia, anti-social personality disorder, and a past history of multiple personality disorder. 

In addition to all this, there are legal difficulties. The Betans aren’t keen to extradite anyone back to Barrayar, but they do have an extradition treaty with Escobar, especially where notorious war criminals are concerned. Aral is fairly safe, as both Betan and Escobaran soldiers have confirmed that conditions massively improved in the prison camp as soon as he took over. Bothari, on the other hand, is very recognisable from Identikit pictures put together by POWs soon after their release - and while the Betans are willing to accept that he was too mentally unbalanced to be responsible for his actions, there are some very angry Escobarans insisting that they can't experience closure until he is in prison. The Betans are stalling on the ground that he's too ill to be put on trial, but tensions are growing.

In the meantime, as he gradually recovers, and tries to make sense of Beta Colony as seen from the perspective of a mental hospital and from what Aral and Cordelia tell him when they come to visit, Bothari has to work out what he wants to do with the rest of his life. At first, he’s baffled by people even asking him that question - it isn't as though he's used to being offered a choice, and if he isn't required as a soldier or a private bodyguard, what else is there? – but he desperately wants to qualify for a parenting licence and satisfy the authorities that he is a fit person to bring up Elena.

I wish I was writing this story, but I don’t feel that I know enough either about mental healthcare, or about Beta Colony, to write it adequately. So if you do, I’d be very grateful.


End file.
